Russian republic in constant battle

MAKHACHKALA, Russia - The two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings have their ethnic roots in Chechnya, a part of the Caucasus Mountains that has spawned decades of violence - from separatist wars to suicide attacks, blood feuds and hostage sieges.

Kate Graney, who teaches government at Skidmore College and specializes in multicultural Russia, said Chechnya has been in almost constant battle against foreign rule since the 15th century.

"The Chechen wars were originally an ethic struggle," Graney said. "Later, when Bosnians and Afghanistanis came to Chechnya, certain elements became more Islamisized, more radical."

The families of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a gun battle with police in Massachusetts overnight, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, left Chechnya long ago and moved to Central Asia, according to the Chechen government.

Advertisement

Authorities have not linked Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to any insurgent groups.

Graney said she sees the bombings in Boston as engineered by troubled individuals, not by a larger group, and not necessarily linked to radical Islam.

"I think these brothers never felt as though they fit in here. One of them had said he had no American friends," she said. "When they became frustrated and resentful enough, radical Islamic ideology was there to show them how to fix it. This bombing reminded me of that American Army doctor who shot up the base in Texas; even a little bit of Columbine."

The Kremlin-backed strongman, who now leads Chechnya, says the brothers got their inspiration in the U.S., not the troubled region in southern Russia.

"They weren't living here. They were living, studying and growing up in America," Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said in an interview on Russian television. "They have been educated there, not here."

Before arriving in the United States a decade ago, the brothers lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, a neighboring, violence-wracked Russian province where their father still resides.

The conflict in Chechnya began in 1994 as a separatist war, but became an Islamic insurgency dedicated to forming an Islamic state in the Caucasus. Dagestan has since become the epicenter of the insurgency.

Russian troops withdrew from Chechnya in 1996 after the first Chechen war, leaving it de-facto independent and largely lawless, but then rolled back three years later following apartment building explosions in Moscow and other cities blamed on the rebels.

Kadyrov has Moscow's carte blanche to stabilize Chechnya with his feared security services, which are accused of killings, torture and other rampant human rights abuses.

The Tsarnaev brothers lived in the region only briefly as children, but appeared to have maintained a strong Chechen identity. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's first name is the same as Chechnya's first separatist president, who was killed in a Russian airstrike.

The suspects' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., urged Dzhokar Tsarnaev to turn himself in, saying, "He put a shame on our family, the Tsarnaev family. He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity."

Now, especially with the 2014 Winter Olympics to take place in Sochi, Russia, Graney said she is concerned Americans may become more concerned about the region and jump to the conclusion that all Chechens are radical Muslims and terrorists.

Russian officials and experts have claimed that rebels in Chechnya had close links with al-Qaida. They say dozens of fighters from Arab countries trickled into Chechnya during the fighting there, while some Chechen militants have fought in Afghanistan.

President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Friday that the Russian leader had long warned the West about the dangers posed by the Chechen rebels.

The U.S. security think tank Stratfor said Friday that if the Tsarnaev brothers had any link to al-Qaida, or one of its franchise groups, it would "likely be ideological rather than operational, although it is possible that the two have attended some type of basic militant training abroad."

Stratfor added that the Boston bombings highlighted the fact that "the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks."

"There will always be plenty of soft targets in a free society, and it is incredibly easy to kill people, even for untrained operatives," it said.